Instant replay for televised sporting events allows the broadcaster to present plays of interest to viewers multiple times. Instant replay is often used to replay significant events during a game in which there may be some question as to the outcome of the play. For instance, instant replay in conjunction with slow motion may be used to determine whether a receiver in a football game had possession of the football while maintaining both feet in bounds or whether a player was down on the ground prior to losing possession of the football. In another example, instant replay may be helpful in determining whether a batted baseball is fair or foul at a given moment. In both examples, the scene of interest within a video stream may only cover a small portion of a display screen. Even in high definition (HD) resolution over an HD-SDI interface, it can be difficult to accurately determine whether a player's knee is down at the moment possession of the ball is lost.
HD-SDI stands for High-Definition Serial Digital Interface. HD-SDI is the common term for a high-definition digital video transmission standard that is part of a family of Serial Digital Interface standards that use a coaxial cable to transport uncompressed digital video. HD-SDI is defined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) in a standard known as SMPTE-292M that provides a nominal data rate of 1.485 Gbit/s. In short, HD-SDI is a standard for transmitting uncompressed broadcast-grade video streams over short distances. Longer distances may be possible using fiber optic cables.
Zooming in on the scene of interest does not always help as the zooming process significantly degrades the picture quality. This is because the resolution of the zoomed portion of a frame of video is often less than the non-zoomed original resolution of the frame of video. Thus, a zoomed image appears more pixelated or blurred than a normal image. For instance, enlarging a portion of a video frame by a zoom factor of two (2) will cut the resolution of the zoomed portion of the video frame in half.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present improvements have been needed.